Salutes without Guns

Reviews

"Here is a writer who finds the metaphor for what has happened and continues, evolves, not often the way we want, in our lives in Africa and the world. He does so timelessly and tellingly, as perhaps only a poet can."

Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize Winner

"Salutes without Guns announces the arrival of a major poet. Ikeogu Oke's poetry has impressive range and exudes gravitas. It's at once supple and stout, lyrical and solemn unflinching and yet leavened by a skilled poet's calming touch. In this splendid collection the poet is able to move fluidly from the mythic to the immediate. His stance - as in a memorable censure of V.S. Naipaul - can be unsparing, but he is also capable of tender-hearted celebration. Here's a vital poet whose cadenced accents speak powerfully, and with rare insight, about the major issues of our day... Read this collection and be enriched by the sheer plentitude and variety of the harvest. Here's a poet gifted with the talent to enchant - even when he casts a gruff eye."

Okey Ndibe, author of Arrows of Rain and a Professor of Literature at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

"This is a wonderful collection. The poems have undergone clinical and meticulous finishing. The are aural, precise, vivid and rhythmic. One of the best collections in contemporary times!."

Uche Peter Umez, author of Dark Through the Delta and UNESCO Aschberg Laureate

About the Author

Ikeogu Oke

"A work of poetry, of literature, is first of all a work of beauty. You can be angry, but you have to be angry in a beautiful way. The problem is that [Nigerian] poets tend to be more skilled in expressing anger than expressing beauty. [Ideally] you read a poem and you see the anger, and you don't feel the anger; beauty is something that strikes you, anger does not. The anger has to be handled constructively so that what emerges is not a work of anger but a work of beauty. Fine if they are angry, they should be angry, but they should not inflict us with works that are not beautiful.

I think love is one of the best emotions that we can produce. Some of my love poems are the best I've ever written. But you can't write about love if you're not a lover. If your love is sincere; write about that love. If your anger is sincere; write about that anger. But don't ever forget that you're writing to create a work of beauty that will survive the anger. Love and anger are ephemeral emotions, but beauty is something that lasts forever."